D.H. Lawrence, Forever on the Move: Creative Writers and Place Louise Desalvo

20 D.H. Lawrence, Forever on the Move: Creative Writers and Place Louise DeSalvo

Even at the end of his life, when D.H. Lawrence was seriously ill with tuberculosis, so ill and invalided that he spent most of his time in bed, he was one of the most peripatetic writers who ever lived. During 1927 (when Lawrence experienced the first of a series of serious hemorrhages), through 1930 (the year of his death), Lawrence and his wife Frieda lived in a series of inns, hotels, borrowed houses, and rented villas; they also visited friends and family for extended periods. All this time, though much weakened, though moving from place to place, Lawrence composed Lady Chatterley’s Lover, one of his masterworks. In these last years, with little energy to spare from the difficult work of simply staying alive and writing – the Lawrences needed his income from writing and were often nearly destitute – Lawrence and Frieda lived in the Villa Mirenda at San Polo Mosciano, southwest of Florence; with friends in Forte dei Marmi; with Frieda’s sister Johanna at Villach in Austria to see if it helped Lawrence breathe more easily (it did, for a time). They moved into a borrowed house in Irschenhausen in Bavaria; moved back to the Villa Mirenda; considered moving back to Eastwood, in the Midlands, where Lawrence lived as a child, but didn’t; joined their friends the Huxleys at Les Diablerets in Switzerland; considered moving back to their ranch in Questa, New Mexico but didn’t (it was a gift to Frieda from Mabel Dodge Luhan); moved to the Grand Hotel in Chexbres-sur-Vevey, on the north side of Lake Geneva in Switzerland, to escape the summer’s heat in Italy; lived in a rented chalet, the Chalet Kesselmatte in Gsteig in Switzerland, for a summer; visited Frieda’s mother in Baden-Baden where the Lawrences decided to give up the Villa Mirenda; moved to Le Lavandou near Toulon; lived with friends for the winter in La Vigie in the island of Port Cros, but

Lawrence became increasingly ill there, so they decided to move on; journeyed by boat to Toulon, and then along the coast for a few weeks; settled in the Hotel Beau- Rivage in Bandol where Lawrence felt at home for the first time in a long while; journeyed to Paris to see to the private publication of Lady Chatterley’s Lover; moved to Majorca; returned to visit the Huxleys in Forte dei Marmi; lived in his publisher’s flat in Florence; moved into the Hotel Lowen in Baden-Baden; visited Kurhaus Platig in the Black Forest, where his condition worsened; moved to Rottach-am-Tegernsee in the Bavarian Alps, where Lawrence came to believe the altitude was wrong for him – here, they had virtually no furnishings, but they had a potted gentian bush, about which Lawrence wrote the poem “Bavarian Gentians”; moved to the Beau-Rivage in Bandol, where Lawrence believed he was able to breathe more easily; moved into the bungalow Villa Beau Soleil in Bandol, right on the sea, with wonderful air and light; moved into the sanatorium Ad Astra in the mountains of Vence (for this move, Law- rence packed his own trunk, and tidied the villa for Frieda before moving); moved into the Villa Robermond in Vence because he believed the sanatorium wasn’t doing him any good and because he didn’t want to die there; dreamed of returning to his ranch in New Mexico, but couldn’t, because now he was near death; died in the Villa Robermond in Vence. All told, Lawrence moved over a hundred times during his lifetime – he was only in his mid-forties when he died, and didn’t begin to move often until he was in his late twenties – averaging five to six moves a year, when others as sick as he was would have stayed put. While some might claim that a settled life is necessary for a writer to be prolific, that moving from one place to another disturbs the rhythm ofa writer’s work habits, Lawrence’s example proves that this truism doesn’t hold for every writer. Lawrence remarked several times that he moved so often because he was searching for a place where he could breathe freely – both literally and metaphorically: in Austria, he felt he needed to leave because, he said, “I feel I can’t breathe” (Letters, iv.63–64). He thought that the mountain air would be good for him, and so moved to New Mexico; he thought that he might breathe better in the south, and so moved to Mexico. Having lived, in childhood, in the mining town of Eastwood in the Midlands, having suffered, from childhood, from a respiratory illness caused by the effects of breathing soot-filled air, he wanted, more than anything, to live in a place free from the harmful effects of industry. He preferred unspoiled places away from people who might interfere with his work. He needed to live where he felt free from people’s demands and so, when he felt people were trying to control him – as when Mabel Dodge Luhan wanted him to revitalize her – he resisted, packed up, and moved on. And though he never found a domestic Eden – for wherever he moved soon displeased him – that very restlessness, that search, that seeking and not finding, seemed essential for his work. Lawrence knew he needed to move to spark his creativity. Though Frieda didn’t want to leave Kiowa Ranch in Questa, New Mexico, in 1925, Lawrence’s decision to

(c) 2013 Kogan Page Ltd. All Rights Reserved Creative Writers and Place 309 move back to Europe prevailed (Letters, v.28). Lawrence knew that a settled life would not work for him. He needed to feel that he could move at any time. Paradoxically, he continually searched for the perfect place to live, suspecting he wouldn’t find it. This tug of war – wanting to find a domestic Eden, needing to move on – seemed necessary for his work. He did not question his impulses and moved when he thought another place might suit him better. When it didn’t, he moved again. He knew he needed to leave England after The Rainbow was banned and after he and Frieda were forced to leave their cottage in Cornwall because they were accused of being spies; he knew that staying in England would kill him and would forestall his ability to write, and so he and Frieda moved to Europe. He knew he needed to leave Europe because the aftermath of the Great War profoundly affected him, and so he journeyed to Ceylon, Australia, and America: the “War finished me: it was the spear through the side of all sorrows and hopes” (Letters, ii.68). He knew when he needed to travel to rejuvenate his art and to find new subject matter. So he journeyed to Sardinia and wrote Sea and Sardinia; to Australia and wrote Kangaroo; to Etruscan sites and wrote Etruscan Places; to New Mexico, where he hoped to write a novel about Indians, and where he penned essays about them, poems about the landscape, and The Woman Who Rode Away, St Mawr, and The Princess; to Mexico, where he wrote The Plumed Serpent; to Italy, where he wrote Lady Chatterley’s Lover, after he became very ill in America and realized that life on the ranch in New Mexico was too hard.

Write what you know well, that truism beginning writers are taught. And for the first several of his novels, D.H. Lawrence did write what he knew: from The White Peacock through Women in Love, Lawrence’s novels were set in England and examined his current thinking about relationships between men and women based upon his own relationships. In Aaron’s Rod, Lawrence used his journey from England to Italy, his adulterous relationship with Rosalind Baynes, and his belief about the corrupt state of Europe, as sources. Early on, Lawrence believed he could become an insider to high British culture because of his achievements. But he learned that although people like Lady Ottoline Morrell and Bertrand Russell might lionize him, they treated him more as a curious specimen – the son of a miner who’d become a famous writer – than an equal. Law- rence was an outsider, as John Worthen has observed in D.H. Lawrence: The Life of an Outsider. He did not belong in his parents’ mining community; he never gained entry into the center of British intellectual and artistic life. No matter how brilliant he was, no matter how groundbreaking his work, he could never be completely accepted: “I do not belong . . . at all, at all” (Letters, ii.33). This enraged him, yet Lawrence understood that his outsider position was necessary for his art, and he cultivated it, forcing a distance between himself and others, writing long haranguing letters criticizing his friends for their behavior, and exposing their peccadilloes in his work. From the margins, he could launch ferocious attacks against whatever or whomever he observed, for he wanted people to change their ways to reflect his ideals. When he lived in England, he savaged Ottoline Morrell in

Women in Love, and he couldn’t understand why the people he criticized in his work objected, and even initiated lawsuits against him (DeSalvo 197). When he lived in the United States, he saw that the country’s history was steeped in blood, and he expressed this in virtually everything he wrote while there: “the unappeased ghosts of the dead Indians” haunted American souls, he wrote in Studies in Classic American Literature (44). When he lived on Lake Chapala in Mexico, he described the destructive hold religion had on the Mexican people in The Plumed Serpent. His work, he believed, would help people change their ways and find a better way to live. He understood that familiarity often stunted his creativity. His senses were sharper, his observations keener, in a new place. He was a quick study, uncovering what he believed to be the essence of a place and its people soon after arriving. Days after moving to Taos, he wrote about an Indian ceremony; as soon as he was in Sardinia, he began writing about it. He began Studies in Classic American Literature, his critique of a way of life revealed through a country’s literature, before he moved to America, recasting his views after living there; he called the American Dream the American Demon. Yet there was an arrogance in his assumption that he could so quickly understand an alien culture: he believed he could penetrate the Indian psyche, but what he wrote – his essay on the snake dance, for example – could not be anything more than a superficial account and more often was a projection of what he believed about Indian behavior based upon the scantiest of evidence: Indians, he wrote, possessed “no inside life” (Letters, iv.362). But he believed whatever he wrote was the truth – not his truth, but the truth.

Why did Lawrence move so often? Why was he so unsatisfied? D.H. Lawrence’s parents moved often. His mother Lydia was initially attracted to Arthur, her charismatic, virile, miner husband. But after marriage, she wanted a better life for herself and her children. She fancied herself better than him: she’d been a teacher, read philosophy, wrote poetry. His filthy presence at the table, crude manners, and drinking disgusted her. She did not want their son David Herbert to work in the pit, and she turned him against his father. During Lawrence’s childhood, his mother was scornful of where she lived, of people’s habits, thought herself better than them, and chronicled her grievances against her living situation and her husband to her son. She hated her house in the Breach, the community built for miners. She hated the view of ash pits from the back of her house. She hated the noise, the smoke, the clanking headstock. She believed she deserved a better life. When Lawrence was six, the family moved again, to another house in the Breach with a wonderful view. They soon moved again. Each time, Lydia hoped the new place would be more suitable. But she soon became dissatisfied and wanted to move on, teaching Lawrence a pattern he himself would enact in adulthood. Lydia told him he could only realize her dreams for him by leaving Eastwood. Lawrence learned from

(c) 2013 Kogan Page Ltd. All Rights Reserved Creative Writers and Place 311 her that the meaning of home was dissatisfaction and disaffection: home was not a place to stay, it was a place to leave; home was not a place to be satisfied, it was a place to be discontented. Still, though he left, though he criticized the Midlands, he idealized it, too, referring to it as the country of his heart. Lydia always wanted something special to distinguish her home from those of her neighbors. A nicer view. A bigger front window. A corner lot. A garden. She hoped a “proper” home would change her life: satisfaction depended upon a change in sur- roundings, not a change in the self, a belief Lawrence learned. She instilled in him a chronic yearning for an unattainable ideal, propelling Lawrence from one place to another, sometimes after a few months, sometimes after a few weeks, but sometimes, too, after a few days. Each time he moved, Lawrence hoped the next place would match his ideals, but it rarely did. At times Lawrence understood the source of his dissatisfaction, remarking that people with a childhood like his were condemned to look for, but never find, an ideal home. During Lawrence’s boyhood, his parents fought constantly. Though he hated the household’s violence, Lawrence’s household with Frieda repeated that familial pattern. Knud Merrild, who lived on the Del Monte Ranch in New Mexico with the Law- rences, recorded the couple’s battles and Lawrence’s brutality toward his dog (167); Mabel Dodge Luhan described the “great black and blue bruises” she saw on Frieda’s body when she undressed (Lorenzo, 94); but Frieda fought back and mocked and derided Lawrence and once smashed him over the head with a frying pan. No change of scene made the couple more tranquil. Near Lawrence’s childhood home was a brook, hedgerows, and open land into which he escaped often. He developed a passion for nature and learned it eased his dissatisfaction. Lawrence’s love of the countryside was engendered, too, by his visits to Jessie Chambers and her family at the Haggs, the family farm: it was one of the few places Lawrence felt at home. Throughout his life, Lawrence paid close attention to the natural world, and wrote site-specific poems, sometimes using what he saw, asin “Almond Blossom” (written in Italy) and “The Evening Land” and “The American Eagle” (written in New Mexico) as a vehicle for social criticism, for discussing the corrosive effects of culture. He liked to work outside and alone, sitting under a tree in the Tyrol; sitting with his back to a rock overlooking the sea in Cornwall; sitting in the shade in the desert in Mexico; sitting with a view of the Rocky Moun- tains before him in New Mexico. Though Lydia Lawrence instilled a restless spirit in Lawrence, she also taught him high standards for a home’s location and appearance. He learned to beautify wherever he lived, no matter how humble his circumstances, no matter how little time he would spend there.

After Lawrence’s marriage to Frieda in 1912, the couple moved constantly in search of the ideal place to live. He liked moving to new places, liked looking forward to what he would find, though he would soon be disappointed. Wherever he lived had to be beautifully situated in a country setting, unmarred by any evidence of industry,

(c) 2013 Kogan Page Ltd. All Rights Reserved 312 Louise DeSalvo preferably high on a hill. It should have a grand view, preferably of water. Near the sea, Lawrence became calm and felt more in touch with a world unpolluted by industry and the presence of human beings; he loved the sea’s constant motion, loved bathing in it, respected its strength, power, and unpredictability. It should be where people lived authentically: Lawrence visited Sardinia in 1921 because he thought an unde- feated maleness still existed there; he journeyed to Etruscan sites because he believed in the authenticity of their culture. Wherever he lived should have air he could easily breathe: he thought if he could find that place it would cure him of his ills. It should be in a remote location so he and Frieda wouldn’t be bombarded with guests (though, when isolated, they fought), and so he could write without interruption; but it should be near a community of like-minded people with whom Lawrence could socialize, but only when he wanted. He sometimes hoped that he could find a place to establish Ranamin, a utopian community. He asked his friends to join him in building this community throughout his life but his dream never materialized. The Lawrences′ attempt at communal living with Katherine Mansfield and John Middleton Murry in Cornwall failed miserably. Lawrence often found places he believed suited his needs, though where they resided might be borrowed, and modest or even derelict. A house on Lake Garda in Italy. A cottage in Fiascherino on the Bay of Spezia. A cottage near Chesham in Buckingham- shire. A rustic abode in Porthcothan in Cornwall. A place in Picinisco in the wilds of Abruzzi. A villa in Taormina in Sicily. A bungalow in New South Wales, Australia. Kiowa Ranch outside of Taos, New Mexico (the home he most longed to return to as he was dying). A house on Lake Chapala, Mexico. But during his life, Lawrence felt truly at home in only four places – Zennor, on the coast of Cornwall; Fontana Vecchia in Taormina, Sicily; the Villa Mirenda, overlooking the Val d’Arno in Tuscany; and Kiowa Ranch in Questa, New Mexico. Even in temporary quarters, Lawrence worked hard to transform it into his own home. He scrubbed grime off brick floors, put up shelves, made a dresser or a cabinet, colored the walls (in Zennor, they were pale pink), decorated pots and jars, borrowed furnishings or bought them at flea markets, sewed curtains, adorned the place with flowers. If he lived in a place long enough, he gardened, planting vegetables and flowers; in Zennor, he made three gardens, one providing vegetables for their table. Lawrence was a househusband, who cooked, baked, cleaned (scrubbing pots until they gleamed), and decorated (austerely, but with beautiful objects arranged aestheti- cally). He ran the household, made travel plans, arranged moves. All this, while he was earning money to support them with his writing, often writing well over 2,000 words a day, often near destitution – when the Lawrences came to the United States, Lawrence had less than $20 (Letters, iv.288). Frieda believed her mission was to be a Magner Mater, the strength behind Lawrence’s genius; she often reclined, a cigarette dangling from her mouth (which Lawrence hated), commenting (often derisively) on Lawrence’s pronouncements. Having grown up with servants, though she loved to wash clothes and cooked occasionally, she did relatively little housework. At Kiowa

Ranch, Lawrence tended the horses, milked the cow, baked the bread, rode horseback to get butter. Lawrence became furious if the place he had moved to didn’t turn out to be the way he’d imagined, though he continually sought a place that could fulfill his “nos- talgia for something I know not what,” as he wrote in Sea and Sardinia (73). He would hear about a place he believed might be suitable, imagine what it would be like, assume it would be better than where he was living, decide to relocate, break up house, and move on. Sometimes – as when the Lawrences moved to Australia from Ceylon – they would move great distances on a whim: someone Lawrence met described Australia to him and it sounded fascinating. Once there, Lawrence would determine whether it met his expectations. Sometimes it suited him and he stayed for a time. But, as when he traveled to Sardinia, as soon as he found something wrong (heat, cold, snow, dirt, the food, the people), or he wasn’t treated well, or if the local inhabitants weren’t living as he believed they should (and authenticity seemed to mean living a life unspoiled by modern civilization), or if he became ill while there (blaming the place, and not his illness, for a decline in health), he would become restless, or fly into a rage, and feel compelled to move on. And then the Lawrences would pack, leave, and move to the next idealized place and live there until it too stopped suiting him. Lawrence believed a new place would mean a new life for him. When he moved to Germany to meet Frieda before they married, he said he wanted to escape from England, wanting a break from his past (Letters, ii.21). When he moved to Irschen- hausen, he felt “cut off from my past life – like a re-incarnation.” When he moved to Porthcothan in Cornwall, he said he would experience “a new life” (ii.489). When he and Frieda moved to Lake Garda, he said he went there to undertake the difficult project of changing himself. When he and Frieda moved to Ceylon, he was eager to see more of the world and wanted “a new start”; by then he was sick of Europe and he moved even though he thought Ceylon wouldn’t suit him, that his stay would be impermanent and that, there, he would only “make more ends” (iv.213). When they moved to Australia, Lawrence remarked upon how, there, the “earth and air are new” (v.260). Except when he was forced to move, Lawrence looked forward to relocating, to finding a place to live, to setting up house again. Once Frieda and he hatched a plan to move, he was optimistic, full of hope this new place would be the “Promised Land” and that he would feel freer and more at peace there. When he thought about the advantages of a new place, he idealized it and studied its history: when he dreamed of living in Erice in Sicily, he learned about the ancient Greek settlement there. He believed that living in such places would allow him “a most fascinating act of self- discovery – back, back down the old ways of time” (Sea and Sardinia, 133). But Lawrence understood, too, that any place would come to dissatisfy him and enrage him; it seemed fascinating when he imagined it, and its reality could never live up to his expectations; moving seemed “a splendid lesson in disillusion” (Letters, v.286).

Lawrence’s first major move, from England to Europe, was precipitated by humiliation and persecution. When he first left, Lawrence felt it was a kind of death. Lawrence believed The Rainbow was the finest expression of his art. In 1915, a reviewer, though, wrote that such a book had “no right to exist in the wind of war” (Worthen 164). The novel was declared obscene and offensive to society, and a directive was issued for all copies of the novel and the plates to be seized and destroyed. The censorship of this work affected Lawrence profoundly for he knew he could not write in a country where his work was condemned. “I curse them all to damnation” (Letters, ii.548), Lawrence wrote when he heard of the order. England became poison- ous to him. In autumn 1917, during the worst carnage of the Great War, because Frieda was German, and because a vicar who lived nearby hated them, the Lawrences were accused of being spies. They were living in a cottage in Zennor, Cornwall, a place Lawrence loved: “At last I am in my own home and feel content,” he wrote; “I feel I have a place here” (Letters, ii.591). The cottage was near a shipping lane. During their residence, more than 49 ships were sunk off Cornwall, three just off the coast of the Lawrences′ cottage. The Law- rences were accused of signaling German submarines off the coast with flashlights. Their home was searched twice; some of Lawrence’s papers were taken. Lawrence and Frieda were expelled from Cornwall by a military directive and told they could not live along the coast. When they moved to London, they were homeless, nearly penniless, and forced to beg friends for places to stay. With Lawrence unable to publish, they had no income. In London, they were placed under surveillance by Scotland Yard, which continued through 1919, when they left England. “I don’t care where I go,” he wrote, “so long as I can turn my back on it for good” (Letters, iii.318). Lawrence believed that he lived in the equivalent of a police state; he had become its victim and the only way he could survive was to leave. After leaving England, he called himself an exile, comparing himself to “Ovid in Thrace” (Worthen 198). He also said he was an outsider, a pirate, a highwayman, an outlaw, a fox in a den. But upon arriving in the United States for the first time, Lawrence thought that he was no wayfarer, that he was, in fact, homeless, and had been for some time. The Lawrences’ mistreatment changed how Lawrence regarded the nature of home for the rest of his life. He began to say he liked not having a home, that he enjoyed a nomadic existence. Having a permanent abode would make him feel trapped. Frieda Lawrence, though, believed these remarks were inauthentic, a result of their being forced into an unwanted exile which changed Lawrence utterly: his wonder and joy at the world vanished; he became bitter, suspicious, and mistrustful (F. Lawrence 150). Lawrence believed eradicating property ownership was necessary for the world to become a better place. He connected the “love of property and love of power” (Letters, ii.297). Possessions “sticking on me like barnacles” (ii.318) made him feel destructive. Often, the Lawrences would leave behind their household goods, set out with a knap- sack, his kitchenino – a contraption rigged to make tea and light meals on the road

– and head to someplace else, furnishing their new household with items from jumble shops, furnishings he made himself, objects begged from friends. There were times Lawrence realized his restlessness was a symptom of inner disquiet: “what ails me I don’t know, but it’s on and on”; Frieda, though, always “craved a home and solidity” (Worthen 209) and their arguments often resembled those of Lawrence’s parents about living arrangements. No matter how difficult the circumstances, wherever Lawrence was – the home of a friend, an inn, a hotel, a steamer, a rented villa – he set up house and began to write. Feeling unsettled seemed to kindle his imagination. After Frieda and he were forced to leave Cornwall, while living in his sister’s house in the Midlands, Lawrence drafted his essays on American literature. On a steamer to Ceylon, he translated Giovanni Verga’s Mastro-don Gesualdo. In a rented bungalow in Thirroul in New South Wales, Australia, he began Kangaroo, writing 3,000 words a day for six weeks. Lawrence’s art was intensely autobiographical. He manifested an extraordinary capacity to render the places he lived and the people he met in exquisite detail, sometimes lyrically, but often critically and satirically. He was a keen observer, alert to the gestures in human behavior signifying character. He replicated conversations he’d had with people he knew in stunning detail, and he also precisely rendered his own dia- tribes against people and places. Frieda Lawrence said his art wasn’t based upon reality, but upon “his deep underneath impressions” (163). Lawrence deliberately moved from one place to another to gather material. His powers of observation became keener in a new place. Once his vision became blunted by habit and routine, he moved on. For much of his life, Lawrence’s inspiration was tied to novelty and change. After Lawrence used where he lived as a setting for his work, transformed the people he met into characters, plucked a life situation to examine, conceptualized a creative work and wrote it, he was finished and had to move for his next work to germinate. Sometimes he worked on a project in situ – as when he began Kangaroo in Australia. But often he wrote about a place when he no longer lived there – as when he wrote Sons and Lovers. After moving, his settings took on a mythic quality, becoming remem- bered places. That sense of one’s continuing connection to a lost place through its recreation in memory is often an important component of his art. Lawrence moved too because he alienated the people he wrote about. His work was intensely critical of people’s behavior. He said his mission was to describe the faults and wrongful ways of people so they would improve themselves, never doubting he knew what was wrong and how they should change. He used the scalpel of words to lay bare each of his character’s foibles, illusions, hypocrisies. What he did, he knew, was write “bombs” (Letters, ii.546). He used his experiences more as fodder for his art than as moments to be experienced for their own inherent value. But the people he used as subjects were often harmed by his portrayals. Mabel Dodge Luhan wrote that Lawrence deliberately intended to harm her by portraying her as a self-destructive woman who sacrificed herself to Indian [his appellation] gods in The Woman Who Rode Away; a friend told Luhan that Lawrence admitted he intended

(c) 2013 Kogan Page Ltd. All Rights Reserved 316 Louise DeSalvo to finish her (Luhan, Lorenzo, 219); Lawrence’s treatment profoundly affected her. Ottoline Morrell said that Lawrence’s portrait of her as Hermione Roddice in Women in Love caused a prolonged depression (DeSalvo 205). Lawrence once wrote Amy Lowell that her character “Many Swans” in her retelling of an Indian sun myth spoke to his “unexplained soul” (Letters, iv.61–62): Many Swans becomes a lonely, solitary exile, incapable of controlling his rage, and he destroys every place, every person he encounters.

Lawrence believed human beings were not stagnant by nature but infinitely capable of change. The easiest way to change he believed was to move. He became committed to constant change, and one of the most powerful insults he could hurl at a person was that they were static. “The human being is a most curious creature,” he wrote. “He thinks he has got one soul, and he has got dozens.” Moving back to Taormina from Sardinia, Lawrence felt his “Sardinian soul melting off me, I felt myself evaporat- ing into the real Italian uncertainty and momentaneity” (Sea and Sardinia, 190). The only way to metamorphose from one self into another was to move; the only way to experience all the possible selves one could be was to move often. But Lawrence did not believe everyone should move. He believed someone like Paulo, whom he met in San Gaudenzio, should stay put; Paulo was an authentic soul and he was destroyed, not enriched, by change. Paulo had moved to America, then returned to Italy. To Lawrence, Paolo had “left his own reality,” and in America “the very quick of him was killed” (Lawrence, Twilight, 87–89). At the beginning of Lawrence’s Sea and Sardinia (which is as much about moving as it is about Sardinia), Lawrence asks, “Why can’t one sit still?” (10–11), meaning “Why can’t I sit still?” He wondered why, even when he lived in Taormina where life was “so pleasant,” he journeyed to Sardinia looking for a better place to live, for moving was inconvenient and drained the Lawrences’ already meager resources. Law- rence’s answer illuminates one of his motives for wanting to move. Lawrence answers that he moved because he anticipated the pleasure it would bring. But, really, “it is the motion of freedom” he was after. If he lived in one place a long time, he felt fettered. Moving made him feel free, bound to no domicile, no set of people, no community, no country. Falling in love with a place, as Lawrence had in Zennor, was risky, for you might be forced to leave. Still, Sardinia soon began to dissatisfy him. The reality of Sardinia was nothing like his fantasy of it and he became enraged: it “had seemed so fascinating to me when I imagined it beforehand,” he said. No place, though, could meet his idealized vision. Through writing Sea and Sardinia, Lawrence learned that many of his moves were impelled by anger. Whenever he began to feel enraged, he moved on. The village of Sorgono in Sardinia, for example, seemed promising. Frieda and he liked the sound of its name, and believed “Sorgono . . . will be lovely” (96) and they might stay. Soon after arriving, Lawrence’s mood became “black, black, black” (110) because an innkeeper didn’t make a fire quickly and was vague about supper. Frieda chided Lawrence: a great fault of his was that he couldn’t take life as it came because he

(c) 2013 Kogan Page Ltd. All Rights Reserved Creative Writers and Place 317 expected it to be other than it was. He conceded that he was furious because “Sorgono had seemed so fascinating” (110) but it wasn’t and he decided they’d move to Nuoro. Lawrence often ascribed his rage to outside circumstances. Sometimes, as when Frieda and he were expelled from Zennor, his fury was appropriate. Often, though, he became enraged because a place didn’t meet his expectations. Lawrence blamed the place, not his own idealized portrait of it. Though Lawrence understood he moved when he became enraged, Lawrence didn’t try to control his rage because of this insight. Instead, it dictated his behavior. Perhaps he knew that he should then move on because if he stayed put he might harm someone, his anger was that unpredictable, overwhelming, and uncontrollable. Perhaps leaving a place protected Lawrence from what he feared he might do. But Lawrence didn’t feel angry while traveling; his anger dissipated. On his sea voyage to Ceylon, he remarked, “no more of my tirades – the sea seems too big” (Letters, iv.208). Contemplating a new, ever changing seascape or landscape made Lawrence focus attention outside himself and soothed his troubled spirit. Upon settling down and setting up house, the demons of dissatisfaction, disillusionment, dis-ease, and rage would return. And soon, he and Frieda moved to another place, where the cycle would repeat itself.

It’s risky for writers not to understand what they need in a home that will facilitate their work. The Lawrences’ moves to Ceylon and New Mexico illustrate this. The Lawrences looked forward to settling in Ceylon and set up house with very little furniture – “chairs and a table or two” (Letters, iv.215) – but with servants because their services were affordable. Lawrence soon began composing “The Ele- phant,” a poem based upon a local ritual. Still, he soon felt he’d never write much because “one doesn’t do much here” (iv.216) and he needed to work because he had promised his publisher a Ceylon novel. Lawrence hadn’t anticipated the enervating effects of the climate. The heat was oppressive; the smells made him nauseous; the food made him sick – he developed dysentery; “the horrid noises of the birds and creatures, who hammer and clang and rattle” (Letters, iv.225) outraged him. He’d expected Ceylon to be a new start. Though it was fascinating at first, Lawrence felt he “would die” if he had to stay (iv.227). His breathing was labored; the “choky feel of tropical forest” felt like a prison (iv.225). He needed to get to a place where he could breathe easily. Lawrence regretted their move, believing he and Frieda had been hugely mistaken in leaving Europe. In this unfamiliar landscape, he felt untethered: “I . . . look round for myself among all this different world,” he wrote (Letters, iv.216). The Lawrences left Ceylon after six weeks, and moved to Australia. “I like the feeling of rolling on,” Lawrence said (iv.241). “I love trying things and discovering how I hate them” (iv.239). After the Lawrences moved to Kiowa Ranch in New Mexico, Lawrence believed living in such a remote pristine place would benefit his health and his work. But he

(c) 2013 Kogan Page Ltd. All Rights Reserved 318 Louise DeSalvo underestimated the hard labor it would take to turn derelict cottages into livable habitations; he didn’t anticipate the adverse effects of working hard at 8,600 feet above sea level and it nearly killed him: he had a serious crisis of tuberculosis at Kiowa and almost died. Lawrence had to clear years’ accumulation of filth; repair and replaster walls; build a chimney and an oven for baking bread and roasting meats; retile a roof; dig a ditch for water; feed and water horses, and all this labor took time from his writing: “I don’t write when I slave,” he said (Letters, v.45). Lawrence believed he needed to live far from people, but he hadn’t realized how inconvenient it would be to travel to secure the commodities he needed. The road to the ranch was steep, treacherous, and impos- sible to traverse in bad weather. Lawrence had to ride horseback to Del Monte Ranch for milk and butter (until he bought his cow, Susan, and when she wandered off he’d have to find her and chase her back to the ranch) and to another place for eggs (until they got their own chickens). He had to ask Luhan to bring up stores of food (meat, vegetables). He had to travel to Taos for supplies – lumber, nails – he needed for building. Though there was much about Kiowa Ranch Lawrence loved – the splendid setting, the intimate connection with nature – and although while there he wrote essays about New Mexico, the Indians, and the state of the novel, and wrote many of the poems in Birds, Beasts and Flowers! and also St Mawr, The Woman Who Rode Away, and The Princess, among other works, Lawrence never wrote the novel about Indians he’d planned. In the last months at Kiowa, he wrote the play David, but no fiction. He began to see the landscape as sinister, and the American way of life as morally bank- rupt, its people “chained to the perch of prosperity” (Lawrence, Birds, 212). That writer’s dream of living far away from civilization ultimately proved deleteri- ous to Lawrence and his health. After he moved back to Italy, and was living in the Villa Bernarda in Sportono, he realized how salubrious the climate was, and how much easier it was to live where he didn’t have to work so hard (Letters, v.379). He began writing fiction again and started exploring the relationship between people and “the cosmos” in The Escaped Cock, Sketches of Etruscan Places, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and Apocalypse, which describe how “the sun heals, regenerates, makes new” (Worthen 335).

Like many other writers, D.H. Lawrence transformed the places he lived into art. In his letters, he continually examined his lifelong history of moving – why he moved, how he thought a move would affect him, what he anticipated in moving, what he found when he relocated. In his work, he drew upon the places he lived and the people he met, but also upon his evolving insights about human relationships and how their environments affected his characters’ lives. Lawrence knew that his need to move originated in his childhood, in his mother’s discomfiture with where she lived. He knew he must live an exile’s life. Lawrence knew that his would be a relentless, unre- alizable, yet necessary quest for a domestic Eden.

References and Further Reading

Bachrach, Arthur J. D.H. Lawrence in New Mexico. Lawrence, D.H. Sea and Sardinia (1921). Garden Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, City, NY: Doubleday, 1949. 2006. Lawrence, D.H. Studies in Classic American Litera- Brett, Dorothy. Lawrence and Brett: A Friendship. ture. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1951. Philadelphia: J.P. Lippincott, 1933. Lawrence, D.H. Twilight in Italy. Doylestown, PA: DeSalvo, Louise. Conceived with Malice. New York: Wildside Press, 1916. Dutton, 1994. Lawrence, D.H. The Woman Who Rode Away, St. Fay, Eliot. Lorenzo in Search of the Sun: D.H. Law- Mawr, The Princess, ed. Brian Finney, Christa rence in Italy, Mexico and the American South-West. Jansohn, and Dieter Mehl. London: Penguin London: Vision, 1945. Books, 2006. Foster, Joseph. D.H. Lawrence in Taos. Albu- Lawrence, Frieda. Not I, But the Wind. In Rosie querque: University of New Mexico Press, Jackson, Frieda Lawrence (pp. 197–296). London: 1972. Pandora, 1994.[H] Lowell, Amy. “Many Swans: Lawrence, D.H. Birds, Beasts and Flowers! Poems by Sun Myth of the North American Indians.” At D.H. Lawrence. Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow Press, http://arthursclassicnovels.com/fairy/mnyswn 1992. 10.html (accessed Jan. 2013). Lawrence, D.H. David. Gloucester: Dodo Press, Luhan, Mabel Dodge. Edge of Taos Desert: An Escape n.d. to Reality. Albuquerque: University of New Lawrence, D.H. The Letters of D.H. Lawrence: Mexico Press, 1937. Volumes I–V, 1901–1927. Cambridge: Cam- Luhan, Mabel Dodge. Lorenzo in Taos. London: bridge University Press, 1979–1989. Martin Secker, 1933. Lawrence, D.H. Mornings in Mexico. London: I.B. Merrild, Knud. A Poet and Two Painters: A Memoir Tauris, 2009. of D.H. Lawrence. London: Routledge, 1938. Lawrence, D.H. Phoenix: The Posthumous Papers of Sagar, Keith. D.H. Lawrence: A Calendar of His D.H. Lawrence, ed. Edward D. McDonald. New Works. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1979. York: Viking, 1964. Worthen, John. D.H. Lawrence: The Life of an Out- Lawrence, D.H. Reflections on the Death of a Porcu- sider. New York: Counterpoint, 2005. pine. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1969.